


Monster

by bethfrish



Category: Layton Brothers: Mystery Room, Layton Kyouju Series | Professor Layton Series
Genre: M/M, Questionable Underage Implications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 19:06:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/930024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethfrish/pseuds/bethfrish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I can't give you what you want.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monster

"Your father isn't here," said Mr. Triton wearily before returning to his work. A cigarette languished between the fingers of his left hand, smoldering dimly in the low light as an unhappy plume crawled towards the ceiling. 

The burn in the rug had yet to be taken care of, a single scarred crater at the edge of the desk, tiny burnt fibers marring the Turkish wool. Careless with the ashtray again. Mr. Triton had promised to have it restored, and to quit what Alfendi's father referred to as "that filthy habit." Neither had come to pass. The burn loitered through the bustle of the summer holiday and was soon forgotten. 

That summer, the first that Mr. Triton stayed with them. Alfendi was five. His mother was dead. 

Marcus Donnelly lived in the house on the corner then, an impatient boy of six whose only virtue was that his mum kept sweets in a jar on the kitchen counter. Mrs. Donnelly watched Alfendi every Wednesday from noon to five o'clock while his father and Mr. Triton conducted a summer lecture entitled "English Remains of the Iron Age." She was an ample woman of two mediocre talents: cooking and embroidering every handkerchief her husband ever owned, lest someone attempt to claim one such unadorned square as his own. 

"Let me see it!" Marcus demanded one Wednesday afternoon, stretching out his fingers beneath Alfendi's chin. "It's my turn!" Dried chocolate was caked around his nails. Alfendi shook his head. 

"I haven't finished." 

"Hurry then!" Marcus scratched at his cheek. "...What does it even do?" 

Marcus was always asking stupid questions. "It's a puzzle box," Alfendi mumbled. "My father gave it to me. See," he explained, pointing to the small sliver of wood that protruded from the edge. "You have to slide it a certain way, or it won't open." 

"It's my turn!" Marcus repeated irritably, leaning over the table. His breath smelled incomprehensively of onions. 

"No," Alfendi insisted, but Marcus snatched it from his tiny hands and leapt from his chair. 

"Bet I can do it!" 

Alfendi climbed down himself and followed, frowning. "Careful, you'll break it!" he whined, but Marcus spun on his heel and swatted him away. "My father gave it to me, not you!" Alfendi pleaded, and then he heard the snap, the brittle death of a single plate, sliding mechanism rendered obsolete. Hot tears sprang to his eyes as his heart fell into his stomach. 

"Bugger," Marcus swore. He looked at Alfendi and shrugged. "That's a stupid toy," he said, picking at a splinter before abandoning the remains on the table in disinterest. 

Alfendi wiped at his tears with the back of his hand. "It wasn't yours!" he cried, and lunged at Marcus in a fit of rage. 

His hair was just long enough to grab hold of, long enough to wrap his fingers around those limp brown strands the color of inexpensive chocolate and overcooked onions and pull with all his might. Marcus let out a shrill cry of pain and terror, clawing at Alfendi's wrists as he tried to break free, but every twist and contortion of his body only served to strengthen his hold. 

"It wasn't yours!" Alfendi yelled through his tears, shaking Marcus' head between his hands. "I told you it wasn't!" 

Mrs. Donnelly, roused from her embroidery, a crooked, pinkish medley of daisy chains and _GRD_ , ran to the doorway and covered her mouth with her hands. "Stop it! Oh God, stop it right now!" She grabbed Alfendi by the shoulders, shaking them uselessly. "Please, let go!" Mrs. Donnelly begged. 

Marcus let out a terrible scream, then sank to the floor writhing and sobbing. Blood began to ooze from his scalp in pin pricks, deep, dark sproutlings filling the barren patch where his hair had been torn away. 

Breathing heavily, Alfendi let the strands slip from his fingers and onto the floor where they mingled with the dust and the crumbs of a hundred Wednesday afternoons. 

His father sat with him at the dining room table later as Mr. Triton prepared dinner, resting his folded hands at the center of Flora's lacework. 

"You must never do that again, Alfendi," he instructed calmly. His father's hands and nails were always clean. Never full of chocolate, never full of anything. 

"But it wasn't his," Alfendi said quietly. 

"Perhaps not," his father acquiesced. "But a proper gentleman will always share his things. Fighting is certainly not the answer. Don't you agree?" 

Alfendi nodded yes. It smelled of roast chicken and potatoes, his favorite, and they spoke of it no more. 

"Working diligently as always," said Alfendi. "I won't bother you." He hadn't moved from the doorway of his father's office. 

"It's February," Mr. Triton observed, taking a slow drag before dropping the remains into his teacup. "What are you doing here?" He rose from the desk and went to the small sink in the corner, pouring the muddy remains of dregs and ashes down the drain. The tap came on with a creak. "Yes, I'm listening." 

"I've been suspended," Alfendi said. "For two weeks." 

"I see." Mr. Triton shut off the water and for a moment his hands dripped onto the floor. "And this fails to concern you?" He patted them gently against the sides of his trousers. 

"Not particularly," said Alfendi dismissively. "No one is a greater admirer of hollow principles than my father." 

Mr. Triton sat down again, wordlessly. After a moment he reached into the inner pocket of his coat and produced another cigarette. 

"Some might say," said Alfendi, "that I was merely being a gentleman." 

End of Michaelmas term, he was thirteen. There had been snow, briefly, but it had melted in a single morning as the sun beat down upon the grass. Eton was far less dingy in the photographs. 

"Layton, take your seat _immediately_ ," his master of mathematics snapped, rising from his desk, red, calloused palms pressed heavily against the wood. 

There was an error on the third page of the exam, addition when it should have been subtraction, it had to be, otherwise the factorization would never come out properly; Mr. Triton had taught him this easily at the age of nine. The other boys were too insecure or too stupid to see the mistake and would blame their confusion on their own algebraic shortcomings. Alfendi pointed to number twenty-three and told his master, "This is incorrect." 

The birching made him bleed uncontrollably, he was such a skinny boy, and the stains would not come out no matter how many times he washed them, scrubbing with zealous shame in the basin while the rest of the house slept. It hurt to sit down for weeks. 

He was wrong, Alfendi thought. He was wrong and I did not deserve that beating. And he vowed, as _Dear Father_ flowed indignantly from his pen, that he would never be so merciless toward the innocent, never so blind to his own folly. A letter returned in kind: _Respect your elders, my boy, and continue to do well_. 

This he did, even when named House Captain and granted the power to deliver punishment of his own. So many of the younger boys were idle layabouts, or troublemakers whose home-bred insolence had not been disentangled from their other natural aptitudes. Alfendi was not troubled by this responsibility; too few crimes were undeserving. 

But he would not touch the boy who, whimpering and snuffling, arrived at his door because the legibility of his Latin was beyond the literacy of his cruel and unforgiving master, infamous, Alfendi knew, for compelling the older boys to take over the reins of his spineless villainy. 

"You will discipline young Cameron, Layton. You will show him that proper penmanship is not elective." 

Alfendi surveyed the page in silence. _Amare et sapere vix deo conceditur_. His father had impressed upon him the need for flawless letters as such a young child that his hand, at the age of twelve, had declared rebellion. His own writing was marginally more legible. 

He inhaled thinly. "Forgive me, sir, but I can read it quite plainly. Perhaps lines would be more suitable?" 

"I beg your pardon. I don't believe I heard you correctly, Layton." 

A low roar of contempt stirred within him, surging, unseen, in the shadow of his pity, like midnight's incensed ocean against the cliffs. "I think that lines would be a more suitable punishment," Alfendi repeated. 

The Latin master turned a rageful eye on him. "Layton, as House Captain you will cane this boy no less than twelve times, and then you will give him lines until his Rs no longer resemble Vs, and then you will cane him again if I tell you to." Cameron bit his lip to keep from crying, a violent hue of shame and fear and anger staining his cheeks. 

How many times had this master—this coward—been beaten as a boy, Alfendi wondered. How many times had he kneeled over the block with his trousers down, pulled splinters from the raw, ravaged sores on his backside, fingertips slick with blood as he swallowed the agony of his humiliation. Alfendi shut the cover of Cameron's ledger, steadfast in his abandonment of all things prudent, and declared, "You, sir, deserve it more than he does." 

The Head Master beat Alfendi himself, twenty vicious lashes—the birch, not the cane—and spoke gravely of his disappointment. 

"I shall speak to your father at once—a true shame, such a fine man he is." 

Alfendi did not acknowledge his threat; he knew this fine man better than the Head Master. The call would go unanswered for hours, perhaps days. 

"Your father is in a meeting," Mr. Triton told him, attending once again to the boundless disarray of his employer's desk: Hastily graded papers and books with broken spines, turned on their bellies to hold their places for the remainder of their material lives; half-thoughts and lonely, discarded projects, bloated with sleepless nights of research and the initial swollen sting of ambition. Appropriate, Alfendi thought, for a man who sacrificed a career in law for the gossamer threads of his boyhood. "Do you intend to stand there until he returns?" Mr. Triton asked. 

"Yes, I think so," Alfendi replied, noting that Mr. Triton would not request the details of his offense; thirteen years had not changed that. "He'll ring the Head Master. If I'm not back on the train by noon tomorrow, I'll be quite surprised." Again, Mr. Triton said nothing. "And he'll look at you from across the table as we eat tonight—smaller portions, naturally, because dinner was only meant for two—and his heart will silently weep, _why was this child of mine not born in the blessed image of Luke Triton?_ " 

Every holiday there were puzzles. Sliders and blocks and geometric figures left on the table with a half-sheet of Gressenheller stationary. _Three of these before you play_. 

How he hated those inane word games designed to mislead, the lines of algebra rendered inconsequential when his father chuckled, "Did you notice the shortcut?" 

Shortcuts were for fools. For common minds like Flora, who cared for him during the summers when no one else was left. Flora was sweet but simple, an insult to his intellect even at the age of eight. When his father and Mr. Triton traveled to Africa for a month, Alfendi was left in her custody, sacrificed to the whims of three young girls who giggled behind his back and pulled at his curls even after he demanded they stop. 

They forced him to perform in their narrow conceptions of domesticity; marriage and children were, to Flora's daughters, the pinnacle of feminine existence. He was father to Rosie, who was loud and fat and picked from Alfendi's plate at supper when her parents were otherwise engaged, and Lottie, who was more obtuse than anyone Alfendi had ever met, so much so that he refused speak to the girl in his class the following year who had the misfortune of sharing her name, and husband to Harriet, the oldest, who yanked at his hated curls with a shrill, jealous giggle and corrected him whenever he played the game wrong, which was, at its heart, a fanciful set of rules designed by three girls who knew nothing of any value in the world. 

"You must kiss your wife when you come home, Alfie," Harriet scolded, and he grimaced and folded his lips against the inside of his teeth as her sisters nodded in agreement. 

"Alfie's mummy is dead," said Lottie. "He doesn't know how it's supposed to be." 

"A father must also kiss his daughters each and every night," Rosie added. "And tuck them in and read them stories. Don't you know anything?" 

Alfendi glared at those detestable girls as he bit through the inner skin of his lips, thinking about apples and train schedules and the infinite, meaningless stories his father had left for him in an envelope beside the bed that was not even his. He could not remember if his father had ever kissed his mother, only that she was always pale and always so very, very tired. 

"Leave me alone!" he said finally, pushing past them all. "I hate your games and I hate you!" 

He locked himself in the bedroom that wasn't his and ignored their shouts, ignored the rattling of the handle and the dull scrape of nails on wood. Let them shout until their throats bleed, he thought. Let them claw at the door until their nails pull away from their skin and they clench their fists in white-hot agony. Alfendi leaned back against the over-soft pillows and worked through every page his father had given him, just so he could be done with them, just so he wouldn't have to play father-husband for the rest of the day, so his own father would smile upon his return, reach out and lightly pat his shoulder. 

"You think too highly of me," said Mr. Triton. He consulted his watch suddenly and went to the window, prying it open with the well-practiced ease of routine and ushering out the evidence of his vice. He exhaled slowly into the chill as he leaned against its frame. " _Sunt pueri pueri, puerilia tractant_ ," he quoted at the courtyard below. "Children are children, therefore children do childish things. Your father scolded me enough as a boy." 

Alfendi smiled thinly. "Is that so?" 

Mr. Triton stood up straight again, keeping one hand outside the window. He stole another glance at his watch. "You've heard those stories." 

Indeed, Alfendi had; Mr. Triton knew that well enough. His father would never have shared them had Mr. Triton not been there to trigger in him those bittersweet whispers of nostalgia, those prized remembrances of another lifetime that remained, like a thousand-year-old fossil, incased in the protective glass of his father's heart, untouchable. 

"All I ever heard growing up were the valiant tales of your childhood," Alfendi said. "My own could never hope to compare." 

All alone in the yard behind their house, kneeling in the dew of the grass as rabbits flitted in and out of his field of vision like leafy silhouettes of dawn through his bedroom window, or the pale green light that lingered beyond his sight when he rubbed, in half-sleep, at his eyes. Gazing up at the clouds, Alfendi drew their shapes against the sky with his finger, refined once more between the thin steel of scissors, arms outstretched as he squinted into the sun, and all around the suspended mirror of his sky, the godless creation of Mr. Triton's typewriter paper. 

He tacked his clouds to the back door, the fence, into the tiny hole in the dirt where the neighbor's dog, such a small, vicious creature, always snarling, liked to claw its way past the barrier. His father's voice woke him from some reverie, lucid and quietly tranquil. 

"Alfendi... What have you done?" 

His son looked up at him from the grass and the dirt, blood caked beneath his fingernails and smeared across the front of his trousers like the artless painting of a child. 

"It killed the rabbit," he said angrily. "It caught it by the neck and tore it apart. It was only a baby." 

His father stared at the lifeless remains of the neighbor's terrier, wet, matted fur sticking to the curves and peaks of its broken skull. "Alfendi..." he repeated distantly. Then he turned to Mr. Triton, who had been standing there too, and spoke to him with dispassion: "Take him inside." And he walked away towards the back of the house without another word. 

Long ago, so very long ago, Professor Layton crouched down beside Luke and asked, "Do you really understand them?" 

"Yes and no," Luke said shyly, suddenly aware of the awe that too often flowed in a single direction. He felt Professor Layton's eyes on him, that serene expression of pride and judicious affection that made his palms grow hot. "I... I can't speak dog," Luke tried to explain. "But I can sense what he's feeling. Like excitement, or fear. And he senses that I know, so he trusts me." He reached out and scratched his friend fondly behind the ear. "Hey, boy. Professor Layton's okay." 

"Oh!" Professor Layton chuckled when a wet nose snuffled at his hand. "Thank you." He touched Luke's back very gently, placing his thumb against the worn, ribbed collar of his sweater. "You possess an exceptional talent for reading others, my boy. It's a rare gift." 

Luke mimicked the gesture, lightly caressing the fur between the dog's shoulders. "People aren't as easy," he said carefully. "They try to hide what's inside them." 

His neck prickled as the hand on his back disappeared. Professor Layton smiled pleasantly at him. 

"Shall we proceed?" he asked politely, and the dog regarded Luke with large, sad eyes before shuffling away down the street. 

Alfendi looked up at Mr. Triton, still clutching the severed tail in his fist. "He needed to be punished," he insisted quietly. 

"No, Alfendi," said Mr. Triton, kneeling down beside him as he pushed the scissors away into the dirt. "Some dogs are meant to hunt rabbits. It's something inside of them that can't be helped, like hunger or thirst. We can't punish them for that, even if we believe that what they did was wrong." Mr. Triton took Alfendi's hands in his and laid the tail in the grass and wiped the blood away from the boy's palms with his handkerchief. "Does that make sense?" 

Alfendi studied the dog with concern. "But we punish people," he said. "Isn't it the same?" 

"Ah, but Alfendi," Mr. Triton said gravely, "people are different from other animals. We don't have to kill in order to survive. When we cause harm, it's usually out of anger or revenge, or even fear. We teach ourselves to control those feelings because it isn't right to hurt other people, even if they've hurt you." Alfendi wiped at his trousers again. "That's part of what your father means when he says that you must always be a gentleman." 

Alfendi thought for a second, drawing his knees up to his chin. "That's stupid," he said finally. 

Surprise clouded Mr. Triton's face. "Why do you think that?" 

"Father doesn't know anything," Alfendi mumbled into his arms. The breeze swept his curls into his face, soft auburn strands clinging delicately to a bloody smudge on his cheek. He cradled his head in his arms and looked up at Mr. Triton. "Why do you like him so much?" 

Mr. Triton took the tainted scissors from the grass and rose with great effort. "Go inside," he said sharply. "I'm sure your father will want to punish you." 

The tiny rabbit lay on its side several steps away. Alfendi frowned at its mangled remains, pushing himself from the ground as he nodded. Gentleman did not lie, he reminded himself. But Mr. Triton was not lying, only mistaken. 

The dismal chill of winter began to pervade the room. Mr. Triton brought his hand to his mouth, peering into the dirty glass before him and studying Alfendi with pale, weary eyes. 

"He's ashamed of me," Alfendi said. 

Mr. Triton flicked the stub of his cigarette out into the courtyard and pulled the window shut again. "That isn't true." 

"Yes it is," Alfendi said, leaning back against the worn wood of the doorframe. "He never took me with him. Just you, just like it's always been. His perfect little gentleman. All he had to do was call and you came running back, just as he hoped you would." 

Mr. Triton did not immediately respond, but returned to the desk and began rifling through the bottom drawer until he produced a small ladies perfume bottle. "These meetings never go past six," he informed him. "You have three minutes." 

"As do you, it seems," said Alfendi. 

Mr. Triton inhaled sharply, squeezing the atomizer several times in quick succession. Rich, musky notes of cologne pervaded the air, then his clothes, hanging wetly in the office like the low cloud of an impending storm. 

Alfendi gave a derisive laugh. "Does that actually fool him?" he asked. 

"He's never said," answered Mr. Triton. 

The air grew stale as he hunched over his work, pulling a yellowed manuscript from some nameless pile at his feet. Alfendi's nose twitched at the imagined scent of rotten paper, pungent with decades of dust and mildew as it mingled with the heavy perfume of citrus and patchouli and the lingering foulness of tobacco. Mr. Triton drummed the fingers of his left hand against the desk in agitation. 

Alfendi gave an inward smile. 

Soft yellow lights. The pull of leather against his skin. "You've broken your clavicle. Do you know which bone that is?" 

Alfendi squeezed his eyes shut, his head hurt so. He could not remember... Remember what? 

"How about a story?" Mr. Triton sat beside him on the bed, careful not to depress the thin, sterile mattress at his shoulders. Alfendi thought he had gone to Peru with his father. When had they returned? "—as if Don Paolo could have fooled us again—" 

Pale half-light of the office. One of the bulbs had died while they were gone. Luke's luggage still smelled like the trees of the Andes. 

"The doctor hasn't made any progress," Layton told him. "The boy simply doesn't comprehend—" He halted, taking his hat and placing it gently on the sofa. His hands were restless. "You said the studies had shown no lasting damage. Short-term loss, yes, but it does help in...in helping to forget..." He trailed off. 

Luke folded his arms, inhaling the heavy, cloying notes of balsam from the threads of his coat. A low vibration from within disrupted the calm and quiet cadence of his heartbeat. He thought of the boy, all of nine, and answered, "It isn't my decision." 

Pale half-light of the moon. Hotel curtains drawn. It smelled of lavender and clean bed linens. 

"Do you miss your father?" Professor Layton asked him. "It's been nearly three weeks since you've been home." 

Luke thought for a moment, then answered truthfully, "No." 

Professor Layton sat down on the edge of the bed, placing a hand at Luke's shoulder. "Clark is a good man, Luke. You're his son, and he cares for you a great deal." 

"I guess so," Luke agreed. A pause. He rolled onto his side, taking the covers with him. Professor Layton's hand was at his chest now. Luke felt him wince as the buttons of his pajamas brushed against his fingers. "Do you care for me, Professor?" 

"...I do," Professor Layton said after a moment. "I do very much." 

Luke curled up beneath the blankets, bringing his knees to his chest. The room was always drafty in the evenings, thick tendrils of autumn curling up and against the window like ivy, forcing their leaves beneath the glass. He looked up at Professor Layton and touched his hand. "Can I sleep next to you again?" 

Luke curled up once more beneath the blankets, bringing his knees to his chest. He could feel each breath graze the top of his hair, warm, heavy sighs that made him want to shiver. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the unsteady rise and fall of Professor Layton's chest, and as the thick haze of sleep began to overtake him, he whispered softly into the darkness, "I won't tell my father." 

"You see the way he is," Layton said uneasily. "The things he does. They aren't—" The corners of his mouth tightened. He smiled thinly at Luke, ingesting his own words. "He just...just needs a bit of help. He's a good boy, Luke, and so exceptionally bright." 

"He's like his father in that way," Luke offered. 

Layton frowned. The praise hung there, unacknowledged, in the sallow light. "I won't have him called a monster," he said. "I absolutely won't. That impertinent school. As if... As if anyone would choose to return to that kind of news." Again his face tightened. Luke had not received the story in its entirety and did not wish to. "Am I such a terrible father for considering it?" Layton asked suddenly. 

Again Luke felt his pulse beat erratically beneath his skin. "He's your son," he said, "not mine." 

When Alfendi woke up again it was in his own bed. A stuffed bear sat beside his pillow, though he was much too old for such things, smiling tenderly at him with round, doleful eyes. _Feel better, Al. Luke._ The nickname was foreign and unnatural, guilt-ridden. 

"You're awake." 

Ten more hours had passed. It was not his father's voice. He closed his eyes once more and dreamed of hotels in far off little towns, of Don Paolo's inventions, of Mr. Triton and his Professor, holding down his arms as they washed it all away. 

Alfendi looked down at the cuffs of his school coat whose tailored sleeves were forever in competition with the lankiness of his frame. He tugged them uselessly down around his wrists. Across the room, Mr. Triton bent over his pages in mute contemplation. 

"That burn is rather obtrusive," Alfendi began, breaking the silence. "Does it bother him?" 

"What burn?" asked Mr. Triton distantly. 

"The one at the edge of the rug." 

"Oh," said Mr. Triton without looking up. "Why do you think there are constantly books all over the floor?" 

"Forever turning a blind eye," said Alfendi wryly. "Of course, any fault of yours would naturally be of little consequence. Put the next one out on my arm and he'll still forgive you." 

Mr. Triton lifted his head in annoyance and indignation. "That rug is old and you are his son. Whatever else you may think, he does love you." 

"Unconditionally," said Alfendi. " Or so I'm told. He loves you more." 

Mr. Triton did not answer. 

"You're the son he wanted," said Alfendi coldly. "His precious little Luke, forever shining above the disappointment of his blood. But do you know something, Mr. Triton?" he asked with a bitter laugh. "He's a disappointment too. It's all he's ever been." 

Again, Mr. Triton said nothing, but looked up at him impassively from the worn chair of Alfendi's father's desk. 

Alfendi sneered. "Do you know what he'll do when he comes in here?" he asked. "He'll shake his head. He'll fold his arms. He won't get mad, he won't yell. He'll be cross that I've embarrassed him again, but he won't say it. He never does. He'll leave the room and ring the Head Master, and when he returns I'll be on the next train back to school." He let out a slow, jagged breath. "Such a first-rate show he puts on." 

"You don't realize it," Mr. Triton said finally, "but you and I are not so different." 

Alfendi laughed harshly. The sound rang out in the empty hall behind him, a shrill, unhappy note that clung heavily to the silence. He looked at Mr. Triton with narrowed eyes. "When has my father ever disappointed you?" 

The winter before last. Home on holiday and already so very bored. Gone were the puzzles of his boyhood. They were too easy now, and his father lacked the time. 

"Leave us, please," his father instructed, not unkindly, from the desk of his small office at home. "It's very important that Mr. Triton and I finish our report by this evening." Mr. Triton did not look at him, only busied himself with the ribbons of his typewriter, fingers black with smudged ink. 

Alfendi stepped back into the hall and pulled the door closed, still aware of the muted rustle of chairs and papers and the low cadence of debate. He stared ahead with unfocused eyes, as if seeing through to the room beyond. Mr. Triton would be seated at the desk, keys clacking rapidly beneath his fingertips, his father just behind him, one hand braced against the curve between his shoulders. 

Alfendi turned away. His vision refocused. Beside the door sat a vase of Chinese porcelain, carefully centered on a carved wooden pedestal. His father and Mr. Triton had brought the vase back from overseas many years ago, a special gift of thanks from a friend in need. 

Someone was always in need, always desperate. They repaid their gratitude in trinkets and handshakes, monetary rewards and friendly letters with colorful, foreign postage. His father did not embrace people. He did not bestow upon his peers a smile of any genuine authenticity, so perfectly pleasant was his demeanor at any time, in any situation. Alfendi had no recollection of what lay beyond that veil of tranquility, if there resided in his father the same fever that burned incessantly at the core of his own being, or if he would find within the external mold, like the fossils the man held so dear, only dust. 

He lifted the vase from its perch, then threw it to the ground with terrible crash. 

"Surely he'll grow out of it," Layton insisted. His mantra was unconvincing, a murky, stagnant puddle of rainwater, ankle-deep. The boy was ten; Luke had heard it before. 

"He won't," Luke said, scrubbing the blood from his hands. It swirled against the porcelain in pink little waves, in radiant, iridescent bubbles of pink and red and green where the soap pooled in the drain. "That poor animal..." 

Layton did not flinch. 

"I would never have done such an atrocious thing," Luke said. "Not even as a child." 

He was at Cambridge when he received the letter. A baby boy, happy and healthy. 

Layton had visited just after his own birth, he knew. Luke had come across the card while searching through his father's old archaeology texts, neatly preserved between the Table of Contents and Chapter One. _To Clark and Brenda, Many congratulations on your beautiful son._ His handwriting was more precise then, but still familiar. How many letters had Luke received by the age of eighteen? 

Eighteen—His own father would have disowned him if he'd ever found out. 

How he loathed the States. For five endless years he yearned for England, held down by the bonds of his own nostalgia as his adolescent urges grew and festered in the absence of that which he desired most. Those feelings that had smoldered quietly at a muted heat before he was old enough to understand their implications now blazed painfully within his aching heart, and he restlessly counted the days before London would have him back again. 

"Touch me," Luke pleaded upon their reunion, guiding Layton's hand down against the hardness between his thighs. "It's all right now. Haven't you wanted to?" 

No no no, stop looking at me like that you monstrous child. Stop it. I can't give you what you want. 

Layton took him on the bed in the guest room, all of eighteen as Luke grasped at the sheets—torn off later and burned in the fireplace—and gasped into the warm, bare curve of Layton's neck. 

"I've done a horrible thing," Layton despaired when it was over, gazing past Luke from the stiff, foreign whiteness of guest room pillows. 

"No, you haven't," Luke insisted with quiet desperation. He reached across the sheets and found Layton's hand, threading their fingers together in the blue shadows of the setting moon. "It's not wrong—It's not wrong if I love you. Don't you love me?" 

But Layton only closed his eyes, hair curling at the sweat on his forehead. "Of course, Luke. Of course." 

He was married before Luke turned nineteen. She was not a beautiful girl, but her sharp, angular features and pallid thinness were easily overcome by the enduring virtue of her sweetness. She was always kind to Luke, even when he sensed, in the intervals of his visits, that she was fading. 

Layton would not hold his child. "There's no better place than a mother's arms," he remarked genially, but Luke, who recognized the shaded gloom of fear that passed unnoticed by his wife, simply smiled and extended his hand in congratulations. 

Luke's handkerchief was ruined, streaked with dirt and grass and dark, wet handprints the color of disease. He left it in a heap over the drain, staring down at his own reddened fingers, pruned and numb. 

"Why does he do these horrible things?" Layton asked with sudden despair. "What have I done to make him like this?" 

Luke met his gaze before he spoke, and in the exquisite and infinitesimal space of their silence, he recognized the shame and disgust that Layton so desperately longed to bury beneath the perfection of his own persona, to hide within the carefully metered beating of his distant, inflexible heart. Luke saw, in that fleeting instant of misery and despair, the man to whom he gave his innocence so many years ago, whose pale shoulders were freckled with the sunlight of a distant childhood, whose warm hands were careful and firm as they brushed his hair from his eyes and touched him where he ached to be touched, the man who, many years ago, recoiled from the boyish fury of his love, took a wife and had a child. 

Luke laid a tender hand against his arm. "You haven't done anything to make him like this," he said gently. "It's simply the way he is." 

Layton shook his head. "That can't be true," he said dismally. "The things he does... They can't possibly be in a child's nature." 

The beating of his own impassioned heart pulsed in Luke's ears. "Why do you persist in believing that people are empty inside?" he asked desperately. "Why do you constantly try to deny everything that makes you human? Manners and breeding are shadows we cast upon the world, nothing more. Deep inside, we are the way we are. Your son needs you to understand that," Luke insisted. "He needs you to see him as the child he is, not the one you wish he would be." He moved closer, placing his hand against Layton's chest. "Except you're so terrified of what you might find, you refuse to look." A dull heat radiated against his palm. "But of course you would," he said ruefully. "It's what you've always done." 

Layton bristled. "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean." 

Luke looked up at him desperately. "Don't lie to me," he pleaded, and he lifted his chin and kissed Layton softly on the mouth. 

It lasted but a moment, and in that moment a lifetime; a hundred afternoons of puzzles and mysteries and Flora's cucumber sandwiches, a thousand nights of research and lectures and hotel rooms, standing together at the window beneath the fading light and the scent of expensive tobacco and sherry, the way Layton flinched when Luke brushed past his hand on the wooden sill, the breathless quiet as Layton touched him hesitantly in the shadows of one o'clock in the morning, drunk on inconsequential vices and the shameless pride of success, before he pulled back and whispered _I'm sorry_ against the flushed heat of Luke's cheek. 

Layton pushed him away and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt. "Don't," he warned, and Luke pursed his lips into a bitter smile and buried what remained of his disappointment and his heartache, for deep inside the tender cavity of his soul, he had always been an obedient child. 

Painted pieces of porcelain flew across the floor, tiny white daggers, breaking beneath his feet as he receded. 

His father and Mr. Triton opened the door to their office and stared at the sea of shattered pottery glittering sadly in the shadows. "What happened?" Mr. Triton asked quietly. 

His father frowned and touched Mr. Triton's arm, spreading his fingers over the despondent curve of his shoulder, nearly a caress, and in that moment Alfendi remembered: Ten years old, overcome with anger and confusion—and blood. There was so much blood. His hands would not come clean, even when the water started to steam and his knuckles turned raw and pink as the dog hair caught in the drain and stuck to the walls of the sink. A quiet note of regret sang out, alone, in the pit of his stomach, unfamiliar and troubling. He turned off the water and began to wonder if he had not sensed in Mr. Triton an equally quiet note of sorrow, nearly imperceptible, within the placid calm of his discourse. 

He thought of this, frowning, as he made his way toward the kitchen, distracted from the low hum of their voices. It was then that he saw them standing in front of the sink, standing so close, Mr. Triton's hand resting lightly against his father's sleeve. And in his father's downcast eyes he sensed an unfamiliar sadness, stark and insecure, the fragile anguish of a man unable to cope with his own suffering. They saw no one but each other. 

Alfendi stole silently around the corner so they wouldn't hear him, so they wouldn't know he'd ever been there, and he went to his room and cried into his pillow until Mr. Triton came in and asked if he was all right, and Alfendi raised his swollen eyes from his arms, nodding stoically at the person he could never be, and said, "Go away, please." 

"What happened?" his father repeated calmly. 

Alfendi stared at the wretched evidence of his destruction, shining blue and white in the fading memory of its glory. Anyone could see the force of the blow was nothing if not intentional. Next to him, Mr. Triton surveyed the loss in silence, folding his arms tightly across his chest. He turned to his father, whose hand still rested tenderly against his shoulder. 

"Isn't it obvious?" Mr. Triton asked sharply. He exhaled; the contact was broken. 

His father spoke with neither anger nor compassion. "Let's give the boy a chance." 

A small, fading light flickered in Mr. Triton's eyes and then went out—Alfendi had never called him Luke, not even once. His father's lessons had vanquished Mr. Triton's own objections, deliberate and seemingly arbitrary; Flora had never been anything but Flora. 

Mr. Triton's presence was odd and out of place in the vacancy of Alfendi's childhood. A would-be barrister, in the caustic words of his own excuse, whose talents he had recklessly abandoned for sentiment. He was tentative but kind, even as the trench around Alfendi's shy, youthful affections grew and deepened, and Mr. Triton gradually became a small, indistinguishable figure in the distance. 

Luke was further still—almost mythical; a joyous, wide-eyed child who adored puzzles and adventures and the infinite and priceless treasures of the world, who would have cried to find his memories of China strewn across the floor in a thousand tiny pieces. Luke was someone Alfendi did not know, someone who had, long ago, been let into the chamber of his father's guarded heart and believed, as Alfendi did not, that it still had something to give. 

His eyes passed over Mr. Triton, and for an instant he felt that quiet and solitary note of regret once more. "I—I must have bumped into the pedestal," Alfendi said before he could stop himself. "I didn't mean to." 

His father looked at him with that faraway, impenetrable expression, foreign and unfeeling, like the dusty, ageless masks he was forbidden to touch. And from somewhere deep inside, Alfendi willed the reprimand to spring forth from his lips. _A gentleman does not break fine Chinese porcelain on purpose. A gentleman does not lie. A gentleman would go to his room at once and write Mr. Triton a letter of apology. You are a wicked boy and it breaks my heart._

But his father only coughed and said, "Accidents do happen. Please be more careful in the future." 

Alfendi looked down at his hands. "I'll clean it up," he promised. 

"Very well," his father said, patting him lightly on the shoulder. "Thank you, my boy." And he turned away to his office and to his work, calling after Mr. Triton to follow. 

The distant, heavy creak of resolution sounded somewhere within the building, the tired moan of unoiled brass hinges and hundred-year-old wood. Footsteps thrummed against the floor like summer's locusts, and from within the swarm, a lone, sharp step receded from the incessant hum of movement and voices and turned a lonely corner. 

Alfendi stared at Mr. Triton intently; their own session was nearly over. "Answer me," he demanded suddenly. "When has my father ever disappointed you?" 

A thin smile played at the corners of Mr. Triton's mouth, and for a moment his eyes betrayed a dull luster of anguish, the glint of heartache and dormant sorrow that once impressed upon the soul lingers forever, shining faintly beneath the joy and gaiety of life. "Your father is a coward," said Mr. Triton. "He disappoints me constantly." 

His words lingered in the air and seemed to softly repeat themselves, a bleak and wistful refrain. Alfendi felt his chest grow feverish. "Then why do you stay here?" 

Mr. Triton spoke at length. "I don't know," he said wearily. "But I believe that your father loves very deeply when he allows it." Then he returned to his work, brushing his fingers involuntarily over the inside pocket of his coat, and said nothing more. 

Alfendi listened quietly to the solemn warning of familiar footsteps, wondering, with veneration and dismay, how he had been wrong. 

And from within the darkened recess of his soul, the core of the black and putrid anger that burned savagely beneath his skin, Alfendi suddenly wished that Luke Triton were dead. 

How he longed, in that unbroken moment, to smash his head in with every relic that cluttered the shelves of their office, their home, their past. Take between his hands every clay pot and bronze scepter and frail, priceless bone that ever held the fleeting form of a life long since perished, and crack them over his skull until his skin and bones opened before him and his eyes shed thick red tears of sorrow and heartbreak. Let his father watch as he destroyed the love he felt more deeply than that of his only son, a terrifying emotion, untamed from years of neglect, throwing the dulled, stained scissors at his feet, slippery with flesh and blood, as he looked down at him with disgust. _See what your lying heart has done._

He squeezed his eyes shut. 

"Alfendi—" 

His son turned and met his gaze, and for a single, imperfect moment, Professor Layton felt the heartsick throb of anguish and concern, too aware of the plea that raged darkly within the boy's eyes, of the chill in the air and the sweet, fading aroma of cigarettes and patchouli, of Luke at his desk, who watched them both with the transparent sadness of his youth— 

Alfendi blinked. He could not do it, he knew. His heart beat rapidly within his chest. 

His father inhaled. Mr. Triton looked away. Alfendi said, "Good evening, Father," and the moment was gone, consumed, it seemed, by some shadowy being, a faceless creature none of them claimed to see. 


End file.
